Sing like canary, grunt like hippo

Jonathan may hold the world's record for having the longest-commuting babysitter. Dad flew over from Belgium to watch him for a few days while Chris, Alex and I went on a job interview. (In our defense, Dad had planned to come all along, but the ostensible purpose of the trip initially was the course he was teaching. When that got cancelled, he graciously agreed to come over anyway, rather than derail our plans.) Jonathan and his grandpa had a terrific time! Auntie Iz joined them for a day and a half. Each time we called to check in, we could barely hear the updates over his delighted shrieks. Grandpa has learned, however, that if he's going to break the house rules, he's going to get ratted out. He fessed up to one mishap before Jonathan related his version: "Big truck go boom. Jo-fan go boom too!" I guess Grandpa thought that was all the news I could handle, because he left it to his small accomplice to detail the rest of the weekend. We were getting the boys ready to go to the store on the last day of Dad's visit when Jonathan chirped "Grandpa, watch race cars again?" And that's how I learned about the Nascar fix.

Alex behaved beautifully on the trip, for the most part. He slept almost all the time on the plane flights and didn't require too much attention in the airports. He had been sleeping a little better at home, but got off his schedule and was up a lot at night. The only incident had to do with his penchant for snorting, groaning, and other vocal adventures. We dubbed him Mr. Grunt a week or two ago - it is pretty striking and we're sleeping much better since we started putting him down in the nursery to sleep. Anyway, I was carrying Alex into the South Bend airport while Chris wrestled the carseat out of the car. There was an older man ahead of us. Alex let out his usual loud flurry of grunts as he settled into the Baby Bjorn. The man turned around and gave me a bewildered and somewhat offended look - I'm sure he thought I was the grunter, and he the gruntee.